A Massachusetts man has been arrested on a murder charge in the violent death of a popular Portland chef who was found dead last month.
Christopher Caron, 42, of Scituate turned himself in to police Aug. 30 in connection with Declan Perry’s killing, the Plymouth District Attorney’s Office said.
Caron is to be arraigned on a murder charge in Hingham District Court on Sept. 2.
Perry, 27, head chef at The Grill Room & Bar in Portland, was found Aug. 23 in a bloody car with Maine plates parked near South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
New details leading up to the gruesome discovery have since come to light:
Just before 2 p.m. Aug. 23, a man wearing a hoodie went into the emergency room and told a nurse a man in his car outside the ER needed help, according to Phillip Brunelle, a Boston-based online investigative journalist.
“As a unit manager walked outside with the nurse the mysterious hooded man walked away,” Brunelle is reporting on his Facebook page.
“They then found a shirtless man in the back seat wrapped in blankets and bound by duct tape, dead when brought to South Shore Hospital,” Brunelle said.
A few hours later two men at a Scituate condo told police they helped a man load something into the same car they had seen on the news.
The two witnesses told police the neighbor said the heavy-blanketed object was a hockey mannequin.
“One of the two witnesses thought he saw human flesh and the two witnesses joked with the suspect, asking ‘is there a dead body in here?’”
During a protective sweep of a condo, Brunelle said, police noticed in a bedroom a reddish-brown stain on the carpet next to a bed and a nightstand.
Police later identified the victim as Perry.
“His father told police that Declan struggled with a fentanyl addiction and relapsed the previous week,” Brunelle says.
Police showed the two witnesses a hospital-surveillance picture of the mystery man who first alerted the South Shore Hospital nurse.
“‘That’s 100 percent him,’” one witness said, according to Brunelle. “‘That looks just like him,’” the other man said.
A state medical examiner found extensive bruising on the victim’s chest and neck, and, according to a state trooper’s report, the examiner “believes Declan Perry sustained numerous instances of blunt force trauma and/or was manually strangled.”
